The Giant Rocking Chair

The rocking chair on East Main Street in Casey, Illinois is 56 feet 1 inch tall, 32 feet 10 inches wide and weighs about 46,000 pounds, and on 20 October 2015 Guinness World Records certified it as the largest in the world. The record required the chair to rock, and by the builders' own account it took ten grown men to do it. Jim Bolin built it over two years from recycled wood and pipe, carving a dove of peace into the headrest and olive branches along the arms, and finished it in August 2015, taking the title from a 42 foot chair on Route 66 at Fanning, Missouri. It is one of a dozen Guinness records Bolin brought to Casey, a town of about 2,400 people just off Interstate 70. Bolin was a vice president of Bolin Enterprises, a family pipeline and tank maintenance firm with a couple of hundred employees, and he started building giant objects in 2011 with a wind chime across the street, to give interstate traffic a reason to come down to a Main Street that was losing its businesses and to the café his wife opened on it. He called that first one his fishing lure, cast out toward the interstate to reel people into a small town. His crews built the rest from scrap on hand, telephone poles, pipe and old oil tanks, and the town now holds more than thirty oversized things, among them a golf tee, a pitchfork, a mailbox, wooden shoes, a pencil and a birdcage, most of them free to visit and several of them working. The project is known as Big Things in a Small Town. Bolin died in January 2026 after a snowmobile accident, and the objects remain.